Once again, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has misrepresented Canadian policy on the world stage.
In the cover story of the most recent issue of Bloomberg Businessweek, Trudeau claims the former Conservative government advocated “headscarf bans”. It’s simply not true.
The PM tells the influential American magazine that in the last election he “was up against a government than ran on snitch lines against Muslims and headscarf bans and a fear-filled narrative that Canadians chose to reject”.
It’s a sloppy take that completely mischaracterizes the former government’s election platform and sends a false message about Canadian politics to the world.
No major political party in Canada has ever proposed a headscarf ban. The closest thing would be Quebec’s failed charter of values, which would have banned the wearing of “conspicuous” religious symbols by public servants in the province. This would have applied to all religions.
Perhaps Trudeau was referring to how back in 2011 the Conservative government did enact a ban on full face veils for the brief one-time occasion when a woman delivers her citizenship oath. A court decision then forced them to defend this law at a time that coincided with the last election.
But this is nowhere near the same thing as banning mere headscarves. A number of countries in the Middle East and Europe have legislated some version of a ban on the more radical niqab or burqa, but no country has banned the commonplace hijab headscarf.
If that is what Trudeau was getting at, he misspoke big time.
Likewise the comment about “snitch lines against Muslims”. The PM is clearly talking about the controversial barbaric practices tip line from the previous election. But to call it a line exclusively against Muslims is only half the story. Regardless of your views on it, there’s no denying it was also intended as a line for Muslims, such as girls who were worried about being victims of honour-based violence.
Canadian readers of the magazine who followed the last election in depth will have the background to read between Trudeau’s gaffes and suss out what he likely means. The majority of the magazine’s international readership will not.
They will think Canadian politicians are advocating broad bans on the hijab and encouraging people to call the cops whenever they spot a regular Muslim person just walking down the street. These are troubling misconceptions to plant in people’s minds. (And the magazine at no point fact checked Trudeau’s errors.)
It’s natural for Trudeau to cast his political opponents in a negative light. This crosses the line though. Trudeau talks a big game about unity. Yet all these antics do is divide.
The silver lining is the PM appears to be walking back his #WelcomeToCanada remarks from earlier this year, which wrongly conveyed the message that we have some sort of open borders policy.
When Bloomberg asked Trudeau about being a “champion of immigration” he said: “there are a lot of things that need to be done internationally to allow people to return home rather than just say the solution is to welcome in everyone. Canada can’t take in 60 million people, obviously.”
Good to hear. Maybe the next time he graces the cover of a foreign magazine, he can also take a moment to correct the record about our non-existent headscarf ban.